Authoritarian demagogue and bigot Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump reads polls. He claims that polls showing him down to former VP Joe Biden are "fake," but that's just another lie of his. He's obviously aware that he's in very deep trouble with the suburban voter, a trend that played out in the 2018 midterm election Dem blue wave.
In a desperate attempt to stop and reverse that trend, just in the last few days, Trump's latched on to extreme rhetoric, suggesting that if Biden is elected, the suburbs will be destroyed by invading hordes of minorities. Now, he's specifically targeting for elimination an initiative that requires local governments to deal with patterns of historic discrimination in housing called the Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). Using rhetoric harkening back to that of segregationist George Wallace in the '60s, Trump said:
“Your home will go down in value and crime rates will rapidly rise. People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they’re going to watch it go to hell. Not going to happen, not while I’m here.”While he left out Wallace's "segregation now, segregation forever" mantra, Trump's not only channeling the racist opponents of fair housing of decades ago, he's reflecting his own experience with his despicable father when they redlined minority applications for their rental units back in the 1970s. Even the Nixon administration found the Trumps' practices too egregious to ignore, and sued them for violating the Fair Housing Act. As is the Trump style, they countersued and dragged out the lawsuit until they finally signed a consent decree that didn't require them to admit guilt.
Trump will sink to any depths to keep his increasingly tenuous hold on power. He's played the racist card before (Confederate symbols, birtherism, etc.) and won't hesitate to use them if he thinks it will shore up his cult base. The problem for him is the suburban voter has changed over the years, and sees his reactionary appeal for what it is: racism.
